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Where, then? where exists the author of this beauty and life,
the begetter of the veritable?
You see the splendour over the things of the universe with all
the variety begotten of the Ideas; well might we linger here: but
amid all these things of beauty we cannot but ask whence they
come and whence the beauty. This source can be none of the
beautiful objects; were it so, it too would be a thing of parts.
It can be no shape, no power, nor the total of powers and shapes
that have had the becoming that has set them here; it must stand
above all the powers, all the patterns. The origin of all this
must be the formless- formless not as lacking shape but as the
very source of even shape Intellectual.
In the realm of process anything coming to be must come to be
something; to every thing its distinctive shape: but what shape
can that have which no one has shaped? It can be none of existing
things; yet it is all: none, in that beings are later; all, as
the wellspring from which they flow. That which can make all can
have, itself, no extension; it must be limitless and so without
magnitude; magnitude itself is of the Later and cannot be an
element in that which is to bring it into being. The greatness of
the Authentic cannot be a greatness of quantity; all extension
must belong to the subsequent: the Supreme is great in the sense
only that there can be nothing mightier, nothing to equal it,
nothing with anything in common with it: how then could anything
be equal to any part of its content? Its eternity and universal
reach entail neither measure nor measurelessness; given either,
how could it be the measure of things? So with shape: granted
beauty, the absence of shape or form to be grasped is but
enhancement of desire and love; the love will be limitless as the
object is, an infinite love.
Its beauty, too, will be unique, a beauty above beauty: it cannot
be beauty since it is not a thing among things. It is lovable and
the author of beauty; as the power to all beautiful shape, it
will be the ultimate of beauty, that which brings all loveliness
to be; it begets beauty and makes it yet more beautiful by the
excess of beauty streaming from itself, the source and height of
beauty. As the source of beauty it makes beautiful whatsoever
springs from it. And this conferred beauty is not itself in
shape; the thing that comes to be is without shape, though in
another sense shaped; what is denoted by shape is, in itself, an
attribute of something else, shapeless at first. Not the beauty
but its participant takes the shape.
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